I have been a premium member of Wealthy Affiliate (WA) since December 2013. This review will be on the premium membership since the starter membership is free and you can easily try it out on your own. With so many so called scam-free affiliate programmes out there, how does Wealthy Affiliate rank against it? I was very skeptical when I first tried the Wealthy Affiliate trial Starter membership.

Just a little background for you to understand why… I was skeptical because I spent about $3,000 learning from a super affiliate in an affiliate marketing course. It was a terrible waste of money and I did not agree with the values of the person. In fact, it did not go down well with the majority of my classmates too. We felt cheated. I thought, if a so-called super affiliate training was that lousy, how good can an online platform training be? I entered with that cautious and sick of scams mentality. However, Wealthy Affiliate took me by surprise. I will be sharing my unbiased views about Wealthy Affiliate with you in this review.

The first thing you should know…

Wealthy Affiliate is NOT a get rich quick scheme.

So what is Wealthy Affiliate?

Wealthy Affiliate is a training platform where you can learn, develop and grow in the area of Internet Marketing (& make it big of course). It has training courses where you can learn the ins and outs of affiliate marketing and interact with a lively growing community of members through the discussions and live chat. (TL;DR infographic at the bottom)

Who should use Wealthy Affiliate?

Well, truthfully. I believe Wealthy Affiliate is for everyone, as long as you can read English and have access to the Internet. I have used it on my iPad mini, laptop and mobile devices and it works like a charm. That means you can build your business or learn anywhere, anytime. I travel 4 hours a day and being able to learn on the move is important to me.

The lessons start from the basics, all the way up to the advanced levels. You can be an absolute newbie or an experienced marketer or a budding entrepreneur, you will be able to learn something from the training and the community. There are members who are students in their teens, stay-home moms, entrepreneurs, super affiliate marketers, job seekers, regular employees (like me) and retirees.

You can benefit from Wealthy Affiliate if you are one of the following.

Internet marketer/online merchant that wants to improve your affiliate sales or scale up your business

Local business owner/marketers that wants to create a website for your business or find new leads for business

Student that wants to make some extra pocket money

Individual that is looking for an additional income

Hobbyist who want to turn their hobby or passion into an additional income

Product creator who wants to sell your products online

Blogger or website owner who wants to improve or monetize your blog/site

Individual looking for a trusted and stable hosting platform

individual who wants to create your own website online

What training does Wealthy Affiliate provide?

Wealthy Affiliate has tons of training material in the platform. I will go through the various courses and classrooms you can learn from.

Certification Courses. There are 5 levels of Certification Courses that you can take. The course starts from the very basic and in each lesson, very clear tasks will be given for you to accomplish before moving on to the next. In this certification course, you will learn how to create your own website, choose a niche, pick keywords that will rank in Google, make money, engage people on social media and much more.

A Starter membership account will let you view the level 1 course. In the level 1 course alone, you will be able to learn and do the following.

One thing I really like is the short task list after each lesson. Follow the lessons, complete the tasks and you are on your way to building a successful website.

Live Video Classes. This is my favourite training in Wealthy Affiliate. Every Friday/Saturday (depending on where you live), Jay, a super affiliate conducts live classes over the Internet. During the lesson, you can ask questions and interact with Jay using the chat function. Here’s a screenshot of some of the classes he had conducted.

Affiliate Bootcamp. There are 7 phases to the bootcamp. The Affiliate Bootcamp teaches you how to promote Wealthy Affiliate to others. It is quite similar to the Certification Courses and it covers topics like website creation, content creation, leveraging on “keywords” to create content that ranks, social media, strategies on Pay Per Click and many more. A Starter membership account will let you view Phase 1 of the Affiliate Bootcamp.

Tutorials by members, for members. This is one of my favourites. Premium members can create training packages and usually these are really useful. There are a lot of help guides created by members to answer queries that new members might have. For example, in the classroom, Everything about WordPress, there are 60 tutorials you can learn from. Here’s a screenshot of classroom.

Tools that are included?

Website Builder. The website builder, SiteRubix, is available to Starter and Premium members. The builder is extremely easy to use and I like the fact that some of the useful plugins have been installed by default. Starter members can create 2 free websites and Premium member can create unlimited number of websites. A review for SiteRubix will be coming up soon.

Hosting Services. All premium membership users can host their websites through WealthyAffiliate. Yes, it is included in your premium membership price. You do not have to pay extra. To get a comparable hosting service of Wealthy Affiliate’s standard, you will need to pay at least $75 per month. Kyle, the owner, gave a very good explanation and comparison of hosting services available in the market. Please click here to read more about it. So if you have loads of blogs to host, but don’t want to do the courses, it is still a good deal to sign up for premium.

I like the latest addition to the hosting services where you can view the health of your site. Below is sample of what you will see if you just created a new site. Those are just 4 out of 8 indicators provided.

Keyword Tool. The keyword tool is pretty useful for generating ideas for writing and finding out the competition of a keyword. I used this tool to find low hanging fruit that I can rank easily on Google. I will be writing a guide on how you can use the keyword to find unexplored keyword gems.

What support can you get?

Support is so important for someone starting out on this journey. Someone to encourage, reach out a hand, answer my questions and offer advice. It truly sucks when you have bought an item and unable to find owner (or anyone?!) to answer your questions. Wealthy Affiliate provides varied forms of support for members and I’ve listed them here.

Live community chat (24/7/365)

Classroom discussions

Feedback on blog post

Live Question & Answer sessions with Kyle & Carson when they are active in the chat

1-on-1 support with the Kyle & Carson through private messaging

Private access to community experts (ambassadors) through private messaging

On a side note, I gave Kyle a few domain names I was thinking off. No prizes for guessing what I chose eventually based on his advise. 😉

The Pros & Cons

Pros

A lot of support provided (private messaging and live chats are my 2 favourites)

Friendly community that does not try to sell you stuff but are sincere in helping

Step by step training in the Certification Courses, Affiliate Bootcamp and Classrooms

So what’s the price?

I started out with the Starter membership when I first joined Wealthy Affiliate. It is free for life and you do not have to enter any credit card details (so put your credit card back into your wallet). You will be given access to the WA community when you join Starter. Starter membership includes access to the live community chat (for the first 7 days), 2 free websites, 2 training courses and access to the keyword tool. The training courses will be enough for you to kickstart your online marketing journey.

Premium Membership. The premium membership is “THE” membership you need. There are no upgrades higher than premium. Whatever you need to succeed is in the premium membership. You will get the full suite that Wealthy Affiliate offers and don’t have to worry about paying more money to learn the “guru of guru’s” training.

I started with the premium monthly membership and eventually upgraded to the yearly premium membership because it made more monetary sense to me. If I use Wealthy Affiliate for a year using monthly payments, I would have to fork out $564 as compared to $359. So, why not, since I am in this business for the long haul.

The Verdict

I was really skeptical in the beginning . I did not participate in the live community chat until the last day of my 7 days live chat support. However, when I did, the community won me over. They were open and were very willing to share. I even spoke to Kyle over the live chat and he was sincere about helping me with the journey.

The cool thing about Wealthy Affiliate, “NO UPSELLS” and no crazy price slashing. I do not have to worry that I will be thrown with another $10,000 offer to learn from a multi-millionaire super duper affiliate and be skeptical about everything that they say.

What Wealthy Affiliate teaches would stand the test of time because it does not involve backlinking and other blackhat methods that might get you into trouble. Even when Google upgrades their algorithms you do not have to be afraid. In fact, it worked well for some of the members in Wealthy Affiliate because their ranking in Google rose.

My verdict for Wealthy Affiliate, it is not a scam at all but definitely takes work to succeed. The good thing is that everything you need to succeed is right there in Wealthy Affiliate. You just need to take action and put in the effort to do well and make it big. I highly recommend Wealthy Affiliate and I give it an overall rank of 9.5 out of 10.

Great blog about WA as a premium member myself I also know how priceless WA training is and how successful anyone can be though WA..well done on the review and I know you will be great things in the coming months and your success is only measured my your own vision…

Dear Michael, I am glad you feel the same about WA too. Indeed, the quality of the training and support given by WA is very rare in the industry. I have benefited much from it. Thank you for your well wishes and I wish you success too!

Thank you for your complement! In this economy, one of the best ways to earn an extra income or additional pocket money is through online businesses or Internet Marketing. It’s possible to do so part-time or anytime you want, even on the move with your mobile or tablet. It is accessible to all (with Internet) and has really low start up cost. Wealthy Affiliate is a great place to start!

Dear Florence, wow thanks for the amazing complement! I will be posting more reviews soon so keep checking back! One thing for sure, WA is a great place to be in to learn how to make an extra income online. 🙂

Absolutely Elijah! WA really is not a get rich quick scheme but it provides everyone with the opportunity to start their own business online. It provides great training and the support a newbie needs. The opportunities are limitless and you have the flexibility to apply the lessons to whatever passions or niches you are interested in.

That was a very good review for the training program. I’m glad to see that Wealthy Affiliate offers not just extensive training but also the very important support. You could have great training but without support if you should get stuck, could be just as bad as not having good enough training. It is nice to see that Wealthy Affiliate offers both and more.

Thanks Robert for the encouragement. That is so true! Great training without good support is pretty much useless if you are stuck. That is why I evaluate the support provided for a program when I write reviews. Wealthy Affiliate definitely provides great training and support.

Dear Mark, you are welcome! I am glad you found the review thorough and useful. That is the whole purpose of reviews in IncomeJane.com! To help facilitate the decision making process with honest and comprehensive information.

What Im wondering is if this could be used for CPA marketing. Thats why I found this website.

The reason I stayed: support. I own numerous products and could market almost anything, but….without support it starts looking bad. Im seeking help when I take on too much…..or not enough ;-). Havent marketed in a while due to this. Support is how it is done.

Thanks for stopping by. Yes WA can be used for CPA marketing. When you have a website of your own, it up to you on what you want to focus on. It could be affiliate marketing, promoting of your own products/own business or even CPA marketing.

Support is really important to me too and the good thing is, Wealthy Affiliate gives you opportunities to speak to successful Internet Marketers who can give you good advice and the entire community for support. How are you marketing your products now?